OverviewThe most respected authorities on the Spanish language join to present a dictionary with authoritative resolutions to grammatical problems, idioms, spelling and pronunciation questions, and related situations.

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The English language is like a massive tsunami that threatens to engulf, sink or obliterate other ways of speaking. Anglicisms (words migrating from English into other tongues) are so prevalent and powerful that the rulers of other languages have for many years made battle against the intruders. To no avail, of course.

Did I say "tsunami"? There is no such word in Spanish. Nor, for that matter, does "sunami" appear in the last (22nd) edition of the Dictionary of the Royal Academy of Spain. Of course, quite a few Spanish speakers know what a tsunami is, and therein lies the problem with academicians ruling a language: they are always far behind the speech and the knowledge of the people, and ultimately they have no control over how language is spoken, or even over how it should be spoken.

Now comes the Royal Academy to try to gain some control. In conjunction with the 21 other Spanish language academies from former colonies, it has issued its 848-page Panhispanic Dictionary of Doubts.

Certainly an appealing name, but the doubts in question are not of the existential kind, but rather linguistic or grammatical ones. The explicit aim of this volume is to resolve doubts about the correct usage, meaning, spelling, and structure of the Spanish language; but the covert agenda is surely to try to stop Anglicisms before it becomes necessary to speak English before one can understand Spanish.

The efforts of the DICCIONARIO range from the logical to the bizarre, with an unfortunate predominance of the latter. For instance, the dictionary does not like "whiskey" appearing in written Spanish, even though the world in general, including Spaniards, would know precisely the meaning of the word. Instead it proposes that in Spanish we should refer to that substance as "güisqui," which is visually indigestible in any language and an abomination as a word. Or take "blog," a word surely known by any Spanish speaker with a computer: the dictionary suggests that the nautical term "bitácora" ("binnacle" in English) is a better choice. Are they mad? Use bitácora for blog? That is what they recommend.

Nor does the DICCIONARIO address some practical linguistic issues: for instance, the verb "coger" has a seriously vulgar meaning (equivalent to the "f" verb when referring to sexual congress) in most of Latin America, but it is always benign in Spain, where it means "to get." Although this dictionary does have an entry for the word, no mention is made of its vulgar meaning or the embarrassment the word can cause when misused. Yet this is precisely the kind of issue that should be addressed in a book such as this one.

If Spanish is your native language and you read and write it well, the DICCIONARIO is a fun book to have, and one from which one is bound to learn something. For beginning speakers of Spanish (the ones with the worst "doubts" about the language) this is not a book I would recommend; it is entirely too advanced and technical to be of much use to a novice. Students should consult their teachers before investing in this book. Finally, editors of large cosmopolitan Latin-American newspapers should probably keep a copy the Diccionario de Dudason their desk.

Just what I needed. Dec 31, 2005

This is a must-have book. It's not just a common dictionary, it's a very nice reference book on how to speak correctly spanish, focusing on those words that usually are written/spoken in different ways and that are hard to tell wich one is the correct one.It's a very nice effort from the language academies of spanish spoken countries.

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